Retribution

Sophie stands, begins to pace, stops, turns back to me. “It started as an experiment,” she says. “I’m a witch. To support myself I am—I was—a caterer. I worked the supernatural community. It was a good life. I should have been satisfied.”

She comes back and sinks into her seat. “A few months ago, at a birthday party, at Jonathan’s birthday party, there was an accident.”

Not an accident, Deveraux interjects with a snarl.

Sophie nods. “He’s right. It turned out not to be an accident. His wife killed him —set him on fire with his birthday cake. When I was called in to clean up the—what was left—I got the idea. I’ve always dabbled in cosmetics. Made my own, in fact. It was a dream to start my own business. Thinking about what happened to Jonathan, touching the ash, gave me an idea. Maybe if I used some of his ash, mixed it in a face cream, it might be the breakthrough I was looking for to start a new line.”

“Did you know the ash had any power?”

“No. It was desperation. I was tired of my life. I wanted to be young. Beautiful. I wanted adventure, romance. Things I never had.”

“So how old are you, really?”

She looks away. “Eighty,” she says softly. “Not so old for a witch, but definitely past the midpoint of life.”

“Eighty?” I flash on Burke. “What about your sister then? How old is she?”

“Belinda is ten years older. She’s ninety.”

I shake my head. “No way. You said this happened a few months ago. I saw Burke before that. She looked thirty. How is she doing it?”

Sophie shrugs. “Magic,” she says. “You saw how she worked the glamour that transformed her into Simone Tremaine. She can be any age or look like anyone she wants to. She’s very powerful.”

“So why didn’t you do the same thing?”

“It takes continuous and exhausting effort to maintain a change in physical appearance. I wish to direct my effort to more positive things.”

She catches herself. “Or at least I used to direct my efforts to positive things.”

“Christ. So you came up with another idea. All this because you couldn’t be content to age gracefully like the rest of the human race.”

A snicker. This from a vampire who will never age.

I wasn’t speaking to you.

Tough.

I brace for a smart-ass rejoinder. When none comes, I focus again on the girl. “Sophie, so what happened when you mixed the ash in your cream?”

“This.” She glances down. “I awoke one morning to find I’d achieved my dream. A perfect, beautiful twenty-year-old face and body.”

And I found myself trapped in a nightmare—the body of an eighty-year-old virgin living in a hovel who cooked for a living. A teetotaling vegetarian. Could it get any worse?

I can scarcely contain my rage. “But how is this possible? Is it permanent? Does Belinda know what you did?” I jerk around to face Sophie. “No. She can’t. Otherwise, she’d have been setting vampires on fire instead of bleeding them, right?”

Sophie nods, but it’s Deveraux who answers. We thought it best to keep what happened to Sophie and me quiet. Sophie knew her sister had a dark side.

“A dark side? Is that what you call turning and torturing young girls for their blood? Whose idea was that?”

“It was Jonathan’s idea,” Sophie says. Then she adds quickly, “Not the torturing part. Jonathan realized using ash resulted in absorbing the entire essence of a vampire. He thought if we used just the blood, we might be able to achieve only physical results. It ’s blood that makes a vampire immortal, that stops the aging process and achieves physical perfection.”

And it worked.

At that, I do slam my fist against the back of Sophie ’s seat. Shut the fuck up. As a result of it “working” Belinda set up a slaughterhouse.

That was never meant to happen, Deveraux whines. Our idea was a blood bank, where vampires would be paid for donations.

The problem arose because the effects weren’t permanent and the side effects—

I know all about the side effects. We have three dead women in San Diego because of side effects. I think Belinda is killing off her test subjects to cover her tracks.

I stop, swallow back the anger. “Let’s go back—why did you take the name Deveraux? How did you explain that to Belinda if she didn’t know you were”—I search for the right word—“harboring this thing inside you? ”

Thing? Deveraux’s outrage squeals through.

Shut up. Let Sophie talk.

Sophie doesn’t seem privy to all my conversations with Deveraux. My guess is that she and he communicate, but since she doesn’t have a vampire’s ability to communicate psychically, Deveraux can block what passes between him and me. A mute button he can push when he wants to. Just as well. I can tell Deveraux what an asshole I think he is without fear of offending her.

Deveraux snorts but urges Sophie to answer.

“Deveraux’s wife was gone.”

“Gone?”

Sophie’s eyes slide away. Deveraux doesn’t comment. I imagine “gone” doesn’t mean she ran away or got a divorce. I shake my head and wave a hand at her to get on with the story.

“There was no other heir to his fortune. With the help of a vampire lawyer he’d had on retainer for a hundred years, a name change was arranged and I was presented as Jonathan’s niece, the last of the family line. That way Jonathan could continue to live in the ma

The last is said with a hint of sarcasm. It makes me smile and Deveraux grunt.

“Belinda didn’t wonder about your newfound wealth?”

“Belinda didn’t care. She was busy trying to figure out how she could get a piece of it.”

“Is that how she got involved in the cream thing?”

When Sophie looks at me, her eyes reflect sadness and regret. “Jonathan and I came up with the idea for the cream. I shared the idea with Belinda. I thought it was something we could do together. She was excited, of course. Especially seeing how it had ‘worked’ on me.

She was eager to pursue it. We tested it here in Denver. Just a bit of vampire blood produced remarkable results. The test subjects wanted more. Belinda increased the potency and the results were even more astounding.”

“And tell me again, how did you obtain the blood?”

“Donors,” she says. “We paid vampires to use their blood. We set up a blood bank. And it was working. The cream turned middle -

aged women young again. We never intended to hurt anyone. Two weeks after the tests started, some of the women began to exhibit side effects. A craving for blood. It only occurred in the ones who got the stronger formula. I cut off their supply, replaced it with a placebo. The women lost the craving. Unfortunately, the physical effects reverted, too. That ’s when I realized that long term, the cream would never work.”

She warned Belinda, Deveraux says. How could she know what her sister was pla